Vox Political on the Latest Kuenssberg Anti-Corbyn Bias Row

Yesterday, Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece commenting on the latest Kuessberg Kontroversy. It will surprise no-one that this is again over her biased misreporting of Jeremy Corbyn’s comments about armed police. The complaint was upheld by the BBC Complaints Division, only to be withdrawn when BBC News complained. So, as Mike observes, she staggers on because she has the support of very important people.

Mike also makes the point that this should not be seen in isolation. Remember the Change.org petition against her on the grounds of her egregious Tory political bias? He also points out the way her supporters have tried to deflect criticism from her with false accusations of sexism and misogyny. The Change.org petition was supposed to be full of sexist attacks on Kuenssberg. It wasn’t. There was only one possibly misogynistic comment out of hundreds, if not thousands. And then there was the instance where she was spontaneously booed at a Labour conference, which was used by Tom Watson and the Tories again to claim that Corbyn’s supporters were nasty sexist curs, who were biased against her because she was female.

Mike makes the point that as a result of Kuenssberg’s flagrant political bias, the Beeb’s reputation as an impartial broadcaster is in tatters, and wonders how long this can be allowed to continue.

Kuenssberg’s continued occupation of the post, and the facile way her supporters, including journos in the supposedly left-wing media, like the Guardian, raises serious questions not only about the Beeb’s impartiality, but also about how she got the job and the whole gender and class assumption behind her supporters in the rest of the media bubble. The accusations of sexism, which were thrown at Corbyn and Momentum from the Blairites were copied from the tactics Hillary Clinton used to deflect criticism from Bernie Sanders’ supporters. A group of them threw money at her, and called her a ‘corporate whore’. Which is exactly what she is, alongside just about everyone else in Congress. The politicians there are keen to accept donations and do the bidding of the big corporations, against the wishes and interests of the ordinary Joes and Josephines of the American public. But unlike Sanders, who didn’t take donations from industry, Clinton was extraordinarily corrupt. She was known for her connections to Wall Street, and had made much money giving talks to them. But unable to defend their candidate any other way, her supporters started moaning about how she the was the victim of ‘Bernie Bros’ and their vicious sexism. And the Blair camp, which copied nearly everything Bill and Hillary did, thought it was a good idea, and started making the same accusations against Corbyn. And when Kuenssberg started getting justified flack for her very blatant pro-Tory bias, her supporters – and various female hacks in the media – started defending her by falsely claiming that Corbyn’s supporters were only doing it because she was a woman.

This is rubbish. Kuenssberg’s gender isn’t the issue. I doubt whether most Corbyn supporters care about her sex one way or another. She’d get the same complaints if she were a bloke, just as Nick Robinson was deservedly criticised for his grotesque misrepresentation of Alex Salmond’s response to a question about Scottish independence. Or David Dimbleby’s increasing bias during Question Time. No-one objects to her because she’s a woman. People object to her because she’s massively biased.

But the defensiveness about her gender does raise the issue of whether she was promoted to her post because of it. Was she selected because she was a woman, and the Beeb was under pressure to be seen to be more diverse and representative? Indeed, was she given the post because she was the only female candidate, and so the Beeb was forced to choose the most inept and biased person for the job simply because of her gender? Or were there many other female candidates, who weren’t given the job, because unlike Kuenssberg, they actually cared about professionalism and journalistic standards, whereas the Tories and BBC management wanted a safe pair of hands? And in this case, a safe pair of hands means someone, who’d spout exactly the propaganda they wanted.

As for Kuenssberg media supporters, somebody – I can’t remember now who – remarked on how closely the media set were now tied through class and background to the political and economic elites. They were all comfortably middle class, went to the same schools and lived in pretty much the same areas as the Tory political and business leadership. And since Blair, the political object has been to increase the numbers of women and Black and Asian people in important positions in business and politics, while at the same time reinforcing class barriers and penalising the poor and unemployed. Hence the automatic support of some of the female hacks in the Guardian for Kuenssberg despite the massive harm the Tory government she supports is inflicting on women.

And the Tories are hurting women in particular. Traditionally female jobs in the service sectors have been particularly hard hit through Cameron’s and May’s austerity. As for cuts to welfare services, there have been numerous reports of women having to starve themselves so they can put food on the table for their families. And at its most extreme, I’m still haunted by one of the cases Stilloaks put up on his blog giving the names and information on the people who have starved or taken their own lives because of Cameron’s bloody cuts to disability benefit. One of these was a young woman her killed herself and her baby after her benefit was cut off.

Let’s be clear: men and boys are also being starved and killed by the Tories. But so long as the Tories’ cuts hit women and girls particularly hard, no-one has any right to try to defend Kuenssberg’s pro-Tory bias with grotty, mendacious claims of misogyny.

Kuenssberg’s a disgrace to journalism and so are the hacks who support and defend this lying propagandist. She is one of the long list of reasons why people around the world are turning to the internet and alternative news channels, rather than a complacent and deeply corrupt mainstream media.

2 Responses to “Vox Political on the Latest Kuenssberg Anti-Corbyn Bias Row”

I agree. A fine article. The mainstream media emits a stream of “fake news”, which means that all sorts of important issues are not addressed, and so a significant proportion of the population believes these lies. The Brexiteers being an example. Although the alternative media enabled by the internet is shining light into some of these areas, I feel a lot of people are misinformed.

My boiler has been having problems recently and I don’t doubt Putin was behind it 🙂 #boilergate